"You can taste a word."

Menu

Category Archives: iconic players

In my guild, we have a long-time mem­ber, I’ll call him Mark. He’s a good and friendly per­son, but he’s def­i­nitely not offi­cer mate­r­ial. Passive-aggressive, flaky, self-centered. Mark’s been pin­ing for offi­cer­ship for years.

I haven’t been in offi­cer­ship for a while (because I’ve been raid­ing more dia­pers than instances), but I was sur­prised to learn of Mark’s recent pro­mo­tion to officer.

Guilds in these online games are com­pletely vol­un­tary, at-will orga­ni­za­tions of peo­ple. This cre­ates a strange dynamic when it comes to leading.

When I was GM, a good friend of mine in the guild–we’ll call him Angus–was excel­lent at lead­ing groups and raids. He wasn’t shy about grab­bing a cou­ple of our more pas­sive guild­mates and mak­ing good things hap­pen like attune­ment require­ments, gear upgrades, and all the rest. In real life, Angus is a con­fi­dent leader who runs his own busi­ness, with employ­ees. His com­pany is suc­cess­ful! I thought, “Wow, he’d be a great offi­cer, maybe even GM!” So he got the nod as offi­cer, and while he was gruff at times, he proved a great asset to the guild.

Over time, I learned that Angus had really been eager to take a shot at lead­ing the guild. We fre­quently had open con­ver­sa­tions among the offi­cers regard­ing whose turn to lead was com­ing. So even­tu­ally, Angus got the nod.

The problem–and it took months for us to learn this–is that his abil­ity to lead a suc­cess­ful for-profit busi­ness involves a com­pletely dif­fer­ent skill set than lead­ing a suc­cess­ful vol­un­tary, at-will orga­ni­za­tion. Angus turned out to be a good boss, but not a great leader.

There’s a class of player who feels that their sta­tus in the raid­ing game means that they’re Right. They label other peo­ple noobs, and the silly thing is that peo­ple believe them. “I have this awe­some item, you don’t, there­fore I know what I’m talk­ing about and you don’t.” This frus­trates me a great deal.

My guild recently brought in a new recruit. Her main is a holy priest, just like me! I’ll call her Mary. She was very per­son­able, online a lot. She had raided a lot in the orig­i­nal WoW, all the way through AQ40, which I’ve never seen. She had taken over a year off from the game, and in her return was look­ing for a more relaxed play­time require­ment while still play­ing at a high level. A per­fect fit!

World of War­craft, and every game like it, is really two dif­fer­ent games. I first read this thought at Penny Arcade (can’t find where because their search func­tion is weak). Basi­cally, you have the lev­el­ling game where you start at L1 and then play until max level (cur­rently L70), and then the game that hap­pens after the lev­el­ling game, which is filled with group activ­i­ties of all sorts as you improve your max level character.

Like most peo­ple, I learned the hard way about sec­ond chances at relationships–backsliding, regres­sion rela­tion­ships, what­ever you want to call it. Namely that they don’t work, despite the fact that regres­sion sex might sound like just what you need after a series of ter­ri­ble first dates. How­ever, unless one of you has been in a coma or sim­i­larly life-changing event, inevitably the crazy in your ex or the behav­ior that brought out the crazy in you (or both) man­i­fests again… and then you finally wake to find your­self stuck in a supremely depress­ing place: exactly the same kind of unhappy sit­u­a­tion you were in before, except you’re older and you have demon­stra­bly not learned your les­son. You’re con­nected again to this per­son who makes you unhappy.

Then you some­how break it off. Whether you’ve extri­cated your­self via your own force of will or via exter­nal causes, you’re free of this per­son and you now have some abil­ity to see this kind of sit­u­a­tion com­ing again. When faced with future back­slid­ing, even­tu­ally you either:

Real­ize that the num­ber of sec­onds you have on this planet is finite, and per­haps regres­sion sex-and-crazy this isn’t the best way to spend those sec­onds. You opt out from that person.